How a guy in Sussex County is creating a tech community downstate

Rob Nicholson is stirring the pot in Sussex County.

A few months ago, he started the Sussex County Delaware Technology Meetup and has been working to galvanize a tech community there.
Instead of shooting for the moon and trying to attract big tech companies to Sussex County, Nicholson, who’s the director of business development for Delmarva VoIP, thinks there’s an easier way to begin growing a tech scene: Through people living in the area who work tech jobs remotely. (Rehoboth’s Phil Hagen, who works remotely for cybersecurity firms and who, until recently, ran a coworking space, is a good model of that.)
Nicholson says there are probably a bunch of closet techies in the area. For instance, he said Hewlett-Packard’s chief cloud strategist lives down the street from him, and he knows the chief tech officer from Avalanche Industries and a senior architect engineer from Autotrader. There might be some validity to what he’s proposing — so far, 100 people have joined his Meetup group.
“I think it’s a pretty interesting opportunity to bridge the gap between where we are now and where we want to be as a county,” Nicholson said.
http://www.meetup.com/Sussex-County-Delaware-Technology/events/228774797/
Tom Glenn, Sussex County’s IT director and fellow tech enthusiast, agrees with Nicholson’s remote worker idea and said having a network of local tech people would benefit the community.
“When you have a question or hit a roadblock, it would be nice to reach out to somebody who maybe knows a bit more than you do in a particular situation or bounce ideas off each other,” Glenn said. He added that the idea is nothing new for other industries, just as real estate agents and bankers, for example, have their own associations.
Nicholson is hopeful more tech folks continue to come out of the woodwork for future meetups. He’s been organizing regular meetings every second Tuesday and calling them TechTalk Tuesdays, which means the next one will be March 8 (RSVP above). He’s also attempting a quarterly meeting called Leadership Lunches, which feature a certain tech topic to discuss for the quarter. The first one has been about tech in education, and the next will be about agriculture.
With these meetings, Nicholson is hopeful to begin discussions about how technology can help the community, particularly from an economic standpoint. Be on the lookout for possible projects involving smart farming and healthcare.